Andrea Dworkin - The Political Memoir of a Feminist Militant

him. He won the debate. This made me question not my

beliefs in equality and fairness but how one could communicate those beliefs. I felt the humiliation of defeat, of course.

I don’t like losing, and I was stunned that I did lose. Stil , the

home team had lost because students thought that Mr. Lewis

III was correct. These were the years of the John Birch Society

and None Dare Cal It Treason , a book in which commies and

socialists were hidden in every nook and cranny of the government and the media, and the point was that these equality-minded folks were Soviet dupes, low and venal. I didn’t see

how my classmates could think being against poverty or for

integration were Soviet ideas or treasonous ideas. Mr. Lewis

was exceptionally gracious.

This was the beginning for me of thinking about something

the entertainer Steve Allen, a liberal, had writ en in National

Review. Roughly paraphrased, Mr. Allen’s piece asked why a

person was categorized as just a liberal or just a conservative.

Wasn’t that same person also a musician or a teacher and a

husband and a father? The patrilineal approach was the only

approach in those days, liberal or conservative. I thought it

was probably wrong to hate people for their politics unless

they were doing evil, as Mr. Kane was. The argument remains

alive; the stereotypes persist, veiled now in a postcommie

rhetoric; I think that hate crimes are real crimes against groups

of people, imputing to those people a lesser humanity. And

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Young Americans for Freedom

even though I’ve lost debates since the one with Mr. Lewis

III, I still think it’s worth everything to say what you believe.

There are always consequences, and one must be prepared to

face them. In this context there is no free speech and there

never will be.

I think especially of watching William Buckley, on his Firing

Line television program in the 1960s, debate the writer James

Baldwin on segregation. Buckley was elegant and brilliant and

wrong ; Baldwin was passionate and bril iant and wore his

heart on his sleeve - he was also right. But Buckley won the

debate; Baldwin lost it. I’l never forget how much I learned

from the confrontation: be Baldwin, not Buckley.

59

Cuba 2

The bad news came first from Allen Young, a gay activist: in

Cuba homosexuals were being locked up; homosexuality was

a crime against the state. A generation later I read the work of

Reinaldo Arenas, a homosexual writer who refused to be

crushed by the state and wrote a florid, uncompromising prose.

I read the prison memoirs of Armando Val adares and heard

from some friends raised in Cuba and original supporters of

Castro and Che about whole varieties of oppression and

brutality. There was also more recently a stunning biography

of Che by John Lee Anderson that gave Che his due - coldblooded kil er and immensely brave warrior. Of course, the river of blood and suffering makes it hard to say why so many

of us, from David Smith to myself, saw so much hope in the

Cuban revolution. Batista’s thuggery was indisputable; his

thievery, too, from a population of the exceptionally poor and

largely illiterate was ugly; but the worst part of it was U. S.

support for his regime. That support made many of us challenge the political morality of the United States. Castro claimed he wanted an end to poverty and il iteracy, and I believed him.

Castro up against Batista is the mise-en-scene. With Castro

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Cuba 2

the poor would have food and books. Castro also promised to

stop prostitution, which had destroyed the lives of thousands

of poor women and children; prostitution was considered

one of the perks of capitalism, and Havana in particular was

known for prostitution writ large. Where there was hunger,

there would be women and children selling sex. Now we would

know to look for other phenomena as well: incest or child

sexual abuse, homelessness, predatory traffickers. It would

have been hard to think of Castro as worse than Batista

outside the context of the cold war. When the tiny band of

guerrilla fighters conquered Havana and extirpated the Batista

regime, it was hard to mourn unless the prospect of equality,

which was the promise, inevitably meant tyranny (which I

think is the right-wing argument). Virtual y forced by the

United States into an alliance with the Soviets, Castro’s

system of oppression slowly supplanted Batista’s. Watching

the United States now cuddle with the Chinese because

Chinese despotism is rhetorical y commit ed to capitalism,

one can only mourn the chance lost to the Cuban people

thirty-some years ago when the United States might have

been a strategic al y or neighbor. I’m saying that the United

States pushed Cuba into the Soviet camp and that Castro

became what he became because of it.

61

The Grand Jury

I was eighteen; it was 1965; a grand jury had been impaneled

to investigate the charges I had made against New York City’s

Women’s House of Detention, the local Bastil e that sat in the

heart of Greenwich Village, in the heart of Bohemia itself. I

had been sexually brutalized and had turned the internal

examinations of women in that place into a political issue

that would eventually topple the ancien regime, the callous,

encrustated Democrats.

I had been subpoenaed to testify on a certain day at a certain

time. My French class at Bennington was also on that day, at

that time, and I was hopeless in the language. My French professor took my haplessness in French rather personally and refused to give me permission to miss the class. I explained

that I had to be absent anyway, and I was. She backed off of her

threat to give me a failing mark and gave me a near-failing

mark instead.

I stayed at a friend’s apartment in New York the night

before my testifying, and Frank Hogan, New York City’s

much-admired district attorney, came with another man that